Friday, September 28, 2012

ChemCam represents the first implementation of LIBS in a planetary science application, and has already used its laser to study some selected Martian rocks around the vehicle.

Optics.org spoke to the suppliers of three of ChemCam's key operational components, to hear about their initial contact a decade ago with co-developers Los Alamos National Laboratory and the French space research institute CNES, and about the novel technology that resulted. (Full Story)

LANL fetes R&D award winners

Video explains one winning technology - valveless laser processing.

Los Alamos National Laboratory recognized four of its teams that won R&D awards Wednesday night at the Hilltop House Hotel. Lab Director Charlie McMillan handed out the awards to the winners. Other teams that were up for awards also were honored.

“These awards demonstrate the continued success of Los Alamos researchers and partners in defining the frontiers of innovation across a wide range of national security science,” said McMillan. “This innovation and creativity will drive the solutions to tomorrow’s problems.” (Full Story)

Experiment in ULF laboratory corrects prediction in quantum theory

Much of what we know about quantum mechanics is theoretical and tested via computer modeling because quantum systems, like electrons whizzing around the nucleus of an atom, are difficult to pin down for observation.

“It’s nice to know what happens in pure samples, but the real world, is messy and we need to know what the quantum rules are in those situations,” said Vivien Zapf, a staff scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos. (Full Story)

A NASA spacecraft has made the clearest record yet of choruses of noise in the Earth's magnetosphere.

The chirps and whoops were captured by one of NASA’s two recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes spacecraft. Collaborators on the EMFISIS experiment include Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

Dawn sees hydrated minerals on giant asteroid

DAWN orbiting Vesta. NASA image

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has revealed that the giant asteroid Vesta has its own version of ring around the collar.

One paper describes how the gamma ray and neutron detector (GRaND) found signatures of hydrogen, likely in the form of hydroxyl or water bound to minerals in Vesta’s surface. GRaND was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

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Friday, September 21, 2012

Forest fires: Burn out

Wild fires dominated the West in 2012. From Nature.

A little after noon on Sunday 26 June 2011, strong winds toppled an aspen tree onto a power line in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico. When a spark from the power line ignited a fire, wind gusts spread the flames into nearby dense stands of fir and pine.

By looking at tree rings, Park Williams of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and his colleagues have been able to assess how droughts stress southwestern forests. (Full Story)

Forests and Climate Change: a Combustible Combination

By looking at tree rings, Park Williams of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and his colleagues have been able to assess how droughts stress southwestern forests. They forecast that if temperatures rise as projected by climate models, trees will face worse drought stress in the first half of the twenty-first century than they have experienced for 1,000 years, probably driving a transformation of the ecosystem. (Full Story)

Experiment corrects prediction in quantum theory

Quantum systems, like electrons whizzing around the nucleus of an atom, are difficult to pin down for observation. One can, however, slow particles down and catch them in the quantum act by subjecting them to extremely cold temperatures.

“Our measurements definitively tested an important prediction about a particularbehavior in a Bose-Einstein Condensate,” said Vivien Zapf, a staff scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos. (Full Story)

Small is beautiful: Viewing hydrogen atoms with neutron protein crystallography

Recently scientists at the University of Toledo, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron crystallography – a technique that even at lower resolutions can locate individual hydrogen atoms. (Full Story)

A step forward for fusion

Ryan McBride watches over the beryllium liner to be imploded by the powerful magnetic field generated by Sandia's Z machine. SNL Photo.

Researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory will announce in a Physical Review Letters paper that magnetized liner inertial fusion, and first proposed 2 years ago, has passed the first of three tests, putting it on track for an attempt at the coveted break-even.

"I am excited about Sandia discovering that magnetized target fusion … is a pathway to significant gain on the Z machine. We agree, and hope that their experiments get a chance to try it out," says Glen Wurden, the magnetized plasma team leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

When Questeña Santana García-Chang saw a video about the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s employee scholarship fund she thought, “I want to be in that.” Today she is.

García-Chang and Francisco “Kiko” Rael hang out with scientists and engineers at their adopted home in Los Alamos. Their days are busy: caring for their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Javan, working 25 hours a week as interns at Los Alamos National Laboratory and studying for college classes. But their eyes are on the prize of careers in environmental/civil engineering and health physics for radiation control.

They are both first in their families to pursue college degrees…. (Full Story)

Mousseau to head LANL program

Jeff Mousseau. LANL photo.

Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Tuesday that Jeffrey Mousseau has been hired as the new associate director for Environmental Programs.

Mousseau currently works as a senior project manager for the laboratory’s transuranic waste disposal program. In his new position, he will oversee this program as well as other key environmental cleanup and monitoring activities. (Full Story)

State improves access to LANL data

State environmental officials say they have finished their upgrade to a database that gives thepublic access to information on clean-up efforts at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

New smart grid unveiled at LANL

An electric grid at Los Alamos National Lab just got smarter. It has been upgraded to a $52 millionstate-of-the-art smart grid and it was powered up Monday.

Everything will be managed through an automated command center to instantly switch back and forth among solar, battery backup and other electric power supplies.

Los Alamos County, LANL and a tech company in Japan all worked on the project. (Full Story)

Kyocera, laboratories launch U.S.-Japan smart grid project

Kyocera Corp. and a number of other companies, research institutes and local governments involved announced the start of operations of an international smart-grid demonstration project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The project is a collaborative effort between NEDO, the New Mexico state government, the Los Alamos Department of Public Utilities, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory — a national research center which is run under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Energy. (Full Story)

The Marine Corps said Angel Fire, jointly developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is “superior to current unmanned aerial systems in that a typical UAS [collects images of] a relatively small, constantly changing area as the air vehicle moves. [Angel Fire] provides a larger, persistent, geo-rectified image with archival capability.” (Full Story)

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Friday, September 14, 2012

From the fourth floor of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a group of New Mexicans spends much of each “Mars day” managing what is arguably the most important part of the Curiosity rover.

On a perfectly sunny California day last week, two of those New Mexicans — the University of New Mexico’s Horton Newsom and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Roger Wiens — showed off their workspace. It’s a windowless room lined with computers and pictures of Mars. For them, what’s important is when the sun is shining on the Red Planet, not on Earth. (Full Story)

Today on Mars: Curiosity is all set to sift sand and bake rocks

This image shows the entrance to the CheMin instrument. NASA

CheMin (for Chemistry and Mineralogy), which will sift Martian dirt so it can be X-rayed. CheMin will identify minerals by examining the diffraction patterns of X-rays that pass through the spaces between atoms.

A battery of tests checking out the Mars rover Curiosity should wrap up today, and she's passing them all with flying colors. Very soon, the rover will start doing what it was sent to Mars to do: Swallowing some soil, baking it and X-raying it, with the goal of finding out whether life could ever have survived on the planet. (Full Story)

"Confirm, we're seeing telemetry,” giving ECT principal investigator Harlan Spence of the University of New Hampshire and the ECT team live data of the particles in the belts from two spacecraft, neverbefore gathered within the radiation belts, just three days after launch. (Full Story)

Safer explosives still pack a punch

A unit cell of a cocrystal of HMX (blue), from C&EN

Three new explosives have attractive properties making some of them possible candidates to replace current military explosive favorites, the nitramines RDX and HMX.

Although RDX and HMX are superior to early explosives they are highly toxic and difficult and expensive to make. David E. Chavez, an explosives chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, says all three groups’ approaches hold promise to overcome such limitations. (Full Story)

LANL to work on vehicle efficiency

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be working on improving vehicle efficiency thanks to a $1.2million grant. The funding was awarded through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicles Technology program.

U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan’s office says the program is investing in three new projects that focus on increasing the efficiency of engines and powertrain systems for future vehicles. The research will also be funded by $300,000 in private investment. (Full Story)

LANL Study’s Tree Death Climate Change Connection

Click on the picture to see the LANL YouTube video.

What are the exact physiological mechanisms that lead to tree death during prolonged drought and rising temperatures? These are the questions that scientists are trying to answer in a Los Alamos National Laboratory research project called SUMO.

SUMO stands for SUrvival/MOrtality study; it's a plot of land on the Lab's southern border that features 18 climate controlled tree study chambers and a large drought structure that limits rain and snowfall. (Full Story)

Also from the Daily Post this week:

LANB hosts United Way 2013 campaign kick off

A large crowd filled the lobby of Los Alamos National Bank Wednesday evening for the United Way of Northern New Mexico's annual kick off campaign.

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Friday, September 7, 2012

Self-defense for the self-driving car

Click on the image to see videos of a textbook police PIT maneuver and a robotic PIT maneuver.

David Mascarenas, a researcher who studies cyber-physical systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory, says that as more robots venture out on their own, their creators are already struggling with how to protect them.

In a more futuristic threat, Mascarenas says that thieves could see vehicles with no human drivers as defenseless targets. So now, before this problem arises on the road, he’s working in the lab on ways to make sure would-be robbers get the bad end of an encounter with unmanned trucks. (Full Story)

Los Alamos National Laboratory expertise in radiation detection and shielding is poised to help a national team of scientists better understand a mysterious region that can create hazardous space weather near our home planet.

The radiation belt — also known as the Van Allen belt in honor of its discoverer, James Van Allen — is a donut-shaped soup of charged particles that surrounds Earth and occupies the inner region of our planet’s magnetosphere. (Full Story)

Also from the Monitor this week:

LA researcher named ACS Fellow

Kristin Omberg

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Kristin Omberg was named as an American Chemical Society (ACS) Fellow for her contributions to national security as a “technical leader in detecting and mitigating biological threats.”

Omberg is the acting division leader of the Decision Applications Division and the laboratory’s project leader for the Department of Homeland Security’s BioWatch Program. (Full Story)

Wild fire computer model helps firefighters

Click on the image to see the video.

A high-tech computer model called HIGRAD/FIRETEC, the cornerstone of a collaborative effort between U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Los Alamos National Laboratory, provides insights that are essential for front-line fire fighters. The science team is looking into levels of bark beetle-induced conditions that lead to drastic changes in fire behavior and how variable or erratic the behavior is likely to be. (Video Here)

Photo: DAWN spacecraft leaves Vesta

NASA image, from the Los Angeles Times.

The elemental composition of the Vesta asteroid is measured with the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector, or GRaND, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This instrument uses a total of 21 sensors with a very wide field of view to measure the energy from gamma rays and neutrons that either bounce off or are emitted by a celestial body. More about DAWN's scientific instruments.

Halo of neutrinos alters physics of exploding stars

Hubble space telescope image of an exploding star. NASA photo.

Sparse halos of neutrinos within the hearts of exploding stars exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events.

John Cherry, a graduate student at UC San Diego is lead author and Joe Carlson and Alexander Friedland of the Los Alamos National Laboratory are co-authors. (Full Story)

Startup uses LANL tech

A new, homegrown New Mexico technology to clean dirty industrial water – more efficiently and less expensively than most other systems, according to the company – could soon be deployed in oil and gas operations worldwide.

IX Power Clean Water Inc. to begin marketing the “OrganiClear” water treatment system, which Los Alamos National Laboratory developed with help from New Mexico Tech and the University of Texas. (Full Story)

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